Better Warm Up

Want to swim better? It starts with proper warm-up.

By Terry Laughlin

Influenced by our recollection of the high school gym teacher leading a round of vigorous stretching, jumping jacks, and toe touching, or a swim coach who started each day’s practice by announcing "400 easy," most of us think the main idea of the warm-up is to get the blood flowing and the muscles supple. But a warm-up designed to prepare you to swim your best, whether in a meet or practice, will have you more ready if it goes beyond simple physiology. At Total Immersion workshops, I emphasize that swimming well depends more on your skill level than on your fitness. It follows that the most important thing you do in a swim practice is train your nervous system. Aerobic-system training becomes, to some extent, simply a product of the time you spend teaching your muscles to move with maximum efficiency and economy. The logical extension of that idea is that warm-up is a time for getting mind and muscles exquisitely attuned and your body will get warmer as you do. I’ll provide some general guidelines on warming up for practices, then specific hints on how to modify your warm-up routine for meets. When arriving at the pool for a practice, your warm-up should accomplish several goals:

Tell you how you feel today. Feeling sluggish after a layoff of several days or perhaps sore and tired from an unusually hard prior workout? Joints or muscles complaining? If shoulders and upper-body muscles are a bit tender, begin with a few minutes of gentle range-of-motion exercises to reveal and release any tightness. Recently I’ve begun taking yoga class once a week and have found the gentle, leisurely movements we perform at the beginning of each class a perfect prelude to swimming as well, so I do 15 minutes in my living room before I leave for the pool. If you’re not into yoga, simply moving your arms in big, lazy circles forward and back, singly and together (not rapid bouncing motions), and slowly moving the arms from front to back overhead, while holding a towel in both hands, are the best methods of loosening up the shoulders.

Put the “warm” in warm-up. In 1977, Swedish researchers Astrand and Rodahl found that muscle cell metabolism and the rate of oxygen exchange from the bloodstream to muscle tissue increase 13 percent for every degree of muscle temperature increase. As it warms, muscle tissue also becomes more supple, reducing the risk of strains and tears. Yet typical water temperature is usually 15 to 20 degrees lower than our body temperature, meaning your first plunge can actually have a chilling effect on your muscles, constricting blood vessels and reducing circulation for the first few minutes. This can cause binding of muscle tissue and an increase in lactic acid levels. A few minutes of light calisthenics before entering the water will increase your body's resistance to that initial shock. Simply increasing the energy level of the range-of-motion exercises suggested above can do that nicely.

Get into the flow and feel of the water. Your first five to ten minutes of swimming should be lazy, fluid, and exploratory. Concentrate exclusively on how you're feeling as you gradually increase intensity. Change strokes frequently to get more joints and muscle groups lubricated. My practices always start with a repeated cycle of one lap free, one back and one breast (I excuse myself from fly until after warm-up), for 5 or 10 minutes. Next, I alternate drill and swim laps for a while to begin to tune up the neuromuscular system. Martial artist Bruce Lee wrote that fine skills should be practiced only when your muscles are fresh. Skillful swimming requires very precise movement patterns, so it helps to do stroke drills and technique work before doing any hard work to reinforce the desired precise movement patterns of skillful swimming. Warm-up may be the most valuable time to do balance drills, because the drills establish a pattern of relaxed and fluid movement. I also routinely use the Fistglove Stroke Trainer during some portion of warm-up in my own swimming and in the practices I coach. If you don’t have a pair, you can simply swim with fists closed to lighten the load on muscles and joints while you find “purchase” with your hands.

Another highly effective warm-up drill is "minus-cycle" swimming. Count your strokes each length and limit yourself to one less stroke cycle (2 individual armstrokes) per length than your normal stroke count. You'll intuitively discover ways to get more out of each stroke. Your technique will improve steadily from devoting attention to it in every workout, and a technique-intensive warm-up will provide the perfect "setup" for the harder swimming to follow.

Pay attention to the “flip” side of warm-up. Don't neglect the warm-down. The last thing you do before hitting the shower should be just as gentle as what you did at the beginning. Never finish a workout with a hard swim. Hard work produces a buildup of lactic acid and other waste products in your muscle tissue. Five to ten minutes of easy swimming will help flush out waste much more quickly and thoroughly, enhancing recovery for your next workout and reducing post-workout soreness.

Meet Warm-ups: Ready To Race

For the last two years, in addition to directing Total Immersion technique workshops, I’ve also coached the sprint group at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. For those collegiate swimmers, the most surprising part of my meet warm-up philosophy has been my promise to them that “I’ll never time you before a meet; I’ll take out my stopwatch only when the race starts.” Rather than “prove” their speed to me in warm-up, I want them to devote themselves exclusively to tuning in to whatever makes them feel slippery and fluent. I can’t count the number of times at Masters meets over the years I’ve watched swimmers racing through frantic 25-yard sprints over and over during warm-up, trying to beat a particular time. I always find myself wondering what they’ll have left when the gun goes off for real. In school and USS swimming, I see coaches with their watches out timing sprint after sprint before the meet ever starts. The time to show everyone how fast you are is when the racing starts in earnest.

The most valuable thing you can do before the race is make your stroke feel great, then make sure your “muscle memory” can recall that feeling when the gun goes off. Here are some things to think about when getting ready to swim your best:

How much to do. Your warm-up yardage depends on several factors. If you've been training heavily, it will take longer to warm up; if you've reduced your training yardage (as in taper), you'll need less warm-up. If there will be a long delay between warm-up and your first race, consider a long easy warm-up to extend the warm-up effect. Distance races require more warm-up than sprints.

Find a warm-up that works, and stick with it. In fact, rehearse your pre-meet warm-up as a workout warm-up for a few days before a big meet. At West Point, we work out a routine for each swimmer over the course of the season and they’ll do it as their practice warm-up during the last week of taper.

Should you sprint? Yes, but… I tell the Army swimmers that although I won’t time them, they’re welcome to do dive-start sprints during warm-up. But I want them to hit top speed for only two to three stroke cycles, either building to top speed right before the turn (we always finish our 25s with a foot-touch) or hitting it right out of their start. They’re to shut down halfway down the pool--just enough to give the nervous system a “taste” of what it will experience in the race, but not enough to cause fatigue or lose the fine racing edge. Neurobiologists believe this "imprints" your neuromuscular system, making it easier to achieve your pace and tempo once the race starts. Those racing longer distances should do some timed pace work to familiarize themselves with how their race will feel, but it should be done as easily as possible and always in something of a buildup fashion, i.e., finish each timed-pace swim faster than you started it to simulate the ideal progressive pace for racing.

Whenever possible, use the warm-up pool before and after each race. Prior to races, raise your heart rate to about 140 BPM before the start. This will minimize the amount of lactate generated in the early stages of the race. You can do this best with moderate-effort swimming. Or do it with light calisthenics ("dry" swimming or step-ups) behind the blocks. After the race, if possible, swim easily for at least 6 to 8 minutes in the warm-up pool to flush lactate from muscles. This is especially important as a restorative measure for subsequent events or subsequent days of a 2- or 3-day meet.

Happy laps!